Lab4living was created in 2007 with the objective of facilitating user driven innovation through co-creation. Lab4Living www.lab4living.org.uk is a collaborative interdisciplinary research initiative between the Art and Design Research Centre (ADRC) and the Centre for Health and Social Care Research (CHSCR) at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. This creative collaboration brings together researchers from the disciplines of design, creative practice and healthcare who have extensive experience related to social, clinical and medical care, disability and ageing. Openness is demonstrated by Lab4Living’s commitment to the development and implementation of inclusive and innovative co-creation methods and formats to engage as wide a community as possible.

References and Track Record

Users are involved as ‘expert partners’ and Lab4Living takes an approach of creating ‘with’ not ‘for’ people.

Head up is a project funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and supported by the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) and by MND patients and carers. We are actively working with them in a collaborative process to enable us to understand their needs and to co-create solutions.

Art House, funded by the EPSRC, explored the potential of film and animation in promoting communication between socially isolated older people and young people living in foster care across Sheffield and surrounding districts and build understanding through the medium of film and digital technologies.

Better outpatient services for older people (funded by NIHR) with the Royal Hallamshire hospital Sheffield explored ways to improve outpatient services for older people through better access and making the services more personal, responsive and respectful of people’s dignity. Using the expert view of patients was a basis for developing training for staff.

Design in Rehab. This project was funded by the Health Foundation and focused on teaching 'Design thinking' skills to people with Spinal Cord Injuries to increase self-efficacy as part of their rehab programme.

Whose diabetes is it anyway? Working with young people with type 1 Diabetes and their families, and Rotherham Hospitals to devise a new support and information service to help teenagers fit Diabetes into their lives better.

TacMap involved a series of user-workshops with blind people form Sheffield Royal Institute of the Blind in the development of an iconic tactile language for use in the production of tactile maps.

Moving Stories explores the potential of art, film-making and digital stories to enable groups marginalised by society to communicate important messages about issues they face. In particular we have been exploring how the technique of stop-frame animation might be used in a health and wellbeing context. Within this research project we worked alongside people with dementia living in care homes in Sheffield.

Engagingaging is a transnational research platform based on the principle of engaging users through a programme of workshops, integrated with the exhibition, to create a ‘theatre for conversation’ to illicit a better understanding of user-needs, which in turn inform design activity